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Review: ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ Wins With Cool Graphics, Warm Hearts

‘Wreck-It Ralph’ (Disney)Super happy fun-time joy joy! At first blush, Wreck-It Ralph swims in a pool of video game goodness, threatening to drown anyone who doesn’t share its nostalgia for the golden era of the early 80s, a time in which arcades, quarters, and pixels ruled the minds and wallets of young people. Yet even if you’ve never been tempted to pick up a game controller, the movie turns out to be built around a very sweet father-daughter relationship that reaches far beyond the constraints of its environment.

Setting aside my own personal connection to the video gaming setting that is celebrated uncritically, it’s the characters who emerge with winning personalities, despite their two-dimensional nature. Wreck-It Ralph (voiced by basso profundo John C. Reilly) is the villain in an arcade game called Fix-It Felix, (the reedy-voiced Jack McBrayer) a Donkey Kong knock-off whose 8-bit graphics fit perfectly with that period. The movie imagines that all the characters in video games are “real,” living lives that are restricted to a degree by their pixellated nature, yet still able to leave their particular environment and visit other games and characters via electrical wiring and gathering in their version of Grand Central Station.

Well, Ralph is tired of being the bad guy, spurned by all the other characters in his game, who party like it’s 1999 and make clear that they don’t want to be friends with Ralph, who has giant hands and an oafish nature. He attends a support group for video game villains, but it’s not helping him deal with his continuing sadness. One night, a misunderstood remark leads him to believe that he he can only win a medal, the other characters will be nice to him and he won’t be so lonely.

So Ralph goes renegade, sneaking into another game, an ultra-modern military fighting game, where he encounters Calhoun (Jane Lynch), and is pursued by Felix, who wants him to come back to the game. (Without Ralph, the other characters suddenly realize, the game is considered defective, and they run the risk of being unplugged and hauled away to oblivion.) Eventually they all end up in Sugar Rush, a candy-themed racing game, where Ralph becomes friends with young Vanellope (the scratchy-voiced Sarah Silverman), who has been ostracized much like Ralph, and tries to stay positive, even though she is lonely too. Meanwhile, she harbors a not-so-secret desire to qualify for The Big Race.

All of this set-up may sound a bit laborious, but the movie slides effortlessly from one story point to the next, driven by the sad-sack antics of Ralph and the chirpy enthusiasm of Vanellope, and enlivened by the performances of actors well-chosen for their vocal talents. Alan Tudyk practically steals the show as King Candy, who rules Sugar Rush with an iron fist big candy cane.

Director Rich Moore got his feet wet with 17 episodes of The Simpsons back in its golden era of the early 90s, before moving onto other shows, most notably Futurama, so he’s well-versed in making every frame count, stuffing the film with visual jokes as well as more video game character namechecks and product placement than would fit in a normal-sized grocery store. The witty dialogue and story supplied by writers Jennifer Lee and Phil Johnston (Cedar Rapids, in which Reilly played a starring role) — with additional story material credited to Reilly — keeps the jokes flying, though time is also carved out to develop a most atypical, and unexpectedly touching, father-daughter relationship between Ralph and Vanellope.

Granted, Wreck-It Ralph hits many of my personal sweet spots, over and over again, and frequently threatened to overwhelm my system with pleasure, so it’s difficult for me to be entirely objective, but I think the movie is a rare treat, one that works its magic on both children and adults.

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Peter A. Martin

Raised in Los Angeles repertory movie houses before spending a decade in tiny Manhattan cinemas, Peter Martin has been freely roaming in DFW multiplexes and art houses for most of the 21st Century. Founder and Editor of Dallas Film Now, Peter also serves as Managing Editor for ScreenAnarchy.com and is a contributing writer for Movies.com, Fandango, and other print and online publications. He is a proud member of the Dallas/Ft. Worth Film Critics Association.
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